hey guys welcome back to another tutorial today we're going to be doing something a little bit
different and we're going to be taking a look at unreal engine 4. we're going to be using it along
with CamTrackAR and some live-action footage shot against green screen to create a 3d environment
based on the mandalorian season 2 is coming out very soon so we thought it'd be cool to create
an alien planet now this is our very first unreal engine tutorial on the channel we've never done it
before and i'm no expert at the software i've only been using it for six or seven months but i have
been able to create some really cool environments for the visual effects that we've made and post
it on social and here on youtube as well we've gotten a few comments from you guys asking how
we created these sort of environments so i'm going to be taking you through a sort of overview of the
process this is a very inexpensive workflow that gets you really high quality results now i'm not
going to cover every single step because i can't condense everything that i've learned in the last
few months into this one video but for any steps that i do skip i'll be sure to put a link down
in the description whether it's a video tutorial or website so that you guys don't miss any of the
steps that i'm talking about if you're interested in one of the specific aspects of the environment
creation you can either skip ahead using the youtube chapters in the play button or you can see
the time codes on screen now as always if you have any questions at any point in the video please do
leave them down below and again i'm not an expert in the software if you are and you see me making
a mistake or seen something that i could do easier please do let us know and we'll be sure to include
it in the next tutorial so the first thing we need to do is actually shoot the scene that we're going
to comp in later this reduces the amount of work that you need to do because instead of building
the entire 360 environment you can just focus on a specific part where the camera is looking
all right technically you don't need a green screen to do this you could rotoscope your actors
out every single frame but that's a pain in the i would highly recommend using a green screen
i wouldn't do it without it it just makes the process a lot easier we do have a tutorial on
using CamTrackAR that goes into more depth but the basic process is you film your scene and
it captures the camera tracking data automatically there's not a lot you have to do to get it to work
one thing that is important to do before you hit record is to walk around and capture the scene for
the ar camera tracking data this helps the camera orient itself in the world and gets familiar with
the planes that already exist in your scene we talk about this a bit more in the actual tutorial
once the footage is shot i can transfer it to my computer and now i can start building the
environment inside of unreal the two things that you need to install for this are unreal engine 4
and qixel bridge which is the asset library that has all of those really high detailed
high quality environmental assets like rocks grass surfaces textures all that kind of cool stuff i'm
going to skip over this step but you can find guides for installing those in the description
if you have never used unreal engine before i would highly recommend checking out the unreal
online learning platform this is an official learning site that unreal or epic games which is
the main company has set up to help you learn the software they have a bunch of different modules on
a wide range of topics if you're interested in vr production or learning more about real time
architect stuff blueprints all kinds of things i would recommend the course that's called your
first hour with unreal engine this has you actually creating a map within an hour taking
you through all the basics in a really easy to understand way so back to my environment the first
thing i'm going to do is create the ground layer and to do that i'm going to follow a tutorial
because there are a lot of people who know more about this software than i do basically what you
do is you create a giant landscape and then using a height map which is a black and white image
you can add random hills and dips inside of the landscape without having to manually sculpt it
unreal does have capabilities to actually sculpt the environment you can add hills you can add dips
flattened plateaus whatever you want it's a lot of fun but for this case i'm just going to use
a height map to make things easier and create the environment based on this image once i apply the
height map to the landscape you can see that it's way too massive for what i'm trying to go for what
i can do is come over to the details panel and set the z scale to something much lower this will
shrink the landscape in one direction only for the surface i'm going to use a mega scans texture
because they're really high quality and they look great pretty much just out of the box so i'll
open up bridge and go into the surfaces and look for something that fits the scene i'm going for
depending on what your scene calls for you can download the texture in either 2k resolution
4k or even sometimes 8k i find that most of the time 4k is what i need because my environments
require that sort of close-up detail that 4k provides and 2k sometimes looks a bit muddy but
if something is far away and you don't really need to see it up close you can probably go with 2k and
save on some space once the texture is downloaded i can then send it directly to unreal using the
link built into the software and it will show up in its own folder under the mega scans directory
i can drag and drop it onto the landscape surface and it might be a bit big depending on the scale
of your scene in this case i'll just open up the material and go into the tiling property
and that's pretty much it for the ground layer everything after this will be props and 3d
assets that we add into the scene i just needed something to establish the base to build off of
for the lighting in this scene i kept it relatively simple i have the directional light
it basically represents the sun and is a single point shining all across the landscape from a
single direction i also used a skylight which captures the scene as it is and then shines it
back onto itself to replicate the bounce lighting that tends to happen in environments like this
you have to be careful with this one because if you turn it up too much your scene will have no
depth no shadows and it will appear very flat for the sky i downloaded a picture that i liked from
hdrihaven.com and brought that into unreal by default inside of unreal's engine content folder
there is an editor skysphere which is basically a sphere and you can make it really big to encompass
the entire map and then apply the hdri to that to do that i'll link the tutorial that i used down
in the description it's the one that's called skydome material the set decoration can be a
lot of fun because it's pretty much just drag and drop and it's really easy to use and change assets
depending on what look you're going for virtual set you can just change whatever you want yeah
right once again i'll be using mega scans but this time i'll go into the 3d assets category
and search for things like icelandic cliffs and rock assemblies that i can just jam together and
they'll work because they all look kind of the same one of the things to keep in mind to save
on space is to only download the lod that you're going to use this stands for level of detail and
most assets from quixl come with multiple levels of details basically the farther away from the
camera an asset gets the less polygons it has in order to save on resources and keep
frame rates quite smooth this is more applicable in games where your character is moving around and
can be far or close to an asset in this case we're going to be staying in a specific spot so i'll
just select level of detail 0 which is the highest once i find and download an asset that i like i
can select export to unreal engine and similar to the materials it will automatically appear
inside of my mega scans folder and from here it's pretty much drag and drop so i can place them into
the scene can change the position rotation i can make it massive or really really small
and in the case of the rocks most of the time i find that i can even mix them together and
overlap them and because they're of the same look and texture they tend to work well together if you
need to change an asset to fit better with your scene you can do that by going into the material
this is in the details panel double-click to open it up one of the things you might
need to change is the albedo tint or intensity and this is tinting the asset a specific color
to help it blend better with maybe your surface or your ground that you have you can also change the
roughness which is how wet the mesh looks so if your scene is rainy you might need to lower this
to get a shinier looking asset i would definitely check out the official qixel channel they have
a bunch of tutorials creating multiple different kinds of environments using high quality assets
and really making them look incredibly realistic a lot of the tutorials are either a multi-part
series or they have a short version and then a longer live stream version where they go into more
detail i find that when building an environment it really helps to have reference photos
of the look that i'm going for so in this case it was based on the mandalorian and so i was
referencing images from the actual show to build this environment and get that sort of rocky look
from here it's just downloading multiple different kinds of assets and placing them
in my scene to get variety detail and texture and to make it look a bit more interesting
one of the things that can make a big difference in your environment is exponential height fog
you can drag that into your scene and it should have an immediate effect
you can change the color the density the distance that it takes to have an effect on the scene
and it can really give some atmosphere into your scene if it's looking a bit flat
the post-process volume is what happens at the end of the render and is the final color correction
any sort of color grade that you might apply changing the way the bloom looks which is the glow
adding a vignette adding grain chromatic aberration this can make a huge difference
in the way your environment looks but in this case i'm actually going to keep it to a minimum
because i know that i'm going to bring this environment into hit film for the composite
and i don't want to have to match all this stuff on my plate if i can just do it inside of hitfilm
so in this case i'm going to keep the post process very small only making tweaks for things that
i can't change after it's rendered once we have our environment built we can now bring our camera
tracking data into the scene so we can see how the camera will be moving in the context of the shot
to import our camera tracking data into unreal we're going to need blender which is free the
reason we need to use blender is because we need to export the camera tracking data as an fbx file
which is what unreal uses for the camera we're looking at improving this process so you don't
have to go through blender to export as an fbx but for now this is the way it is it's
relatively simple so let's just go ahead and take a look when you record your tracking data
cam track will create a dot hfcs file which is a HitFilm composite shot when you open up blender
first delete the default camera in cube and then go to file import HitFilm ar camera tracking data
if you don't already see this you'll need to install the blender python plugin that comes with
CamTrack this is covered in our other tutorial as well but it's a straightforward process once
the camera tracking data has been imported you can see that it is moving along with the scene
i have the camera here and it's moving as i did in the real world next go to file export fbx
and save the file on your computer inside of unreal go to cinematics and add a level sequence
this will create a timeline in what's called sequencer which is basically unreal's editing
timeline create a new camera by clicking this button here and then right click to import an fbx
select the file you just saved out of blender and uncheck reduce keys
if it didn't do it by default set the fps to 60. this is the frames per second
you should now hopefully see that your unreal camera is moving as it did in the real world
now it's time to export our environment from unreal engine and bring it into HitFilm
to do that i'm going to come over to this button which is render as movie
i'm going to leave it as an avi and i would recommend exporting as 4k even if your final
composite is only 1080p this is because all that extra detail will keep the render sharp
and prevent it from looking a bit muddy one thing to note is that CamTrackAR records your
video at 1920x1440 which isn't standard 1080p we give you that footage just in case you need
it but you can always just crop it down to 1080 and it won't have any bad effect on it
so i'll increase the height of the render so that it matches cam track and then select capture movie
at this point we're going to move into HitFilm and bring in our footage and our exported background
we don't have to do any camera tracking because the exported background will have all of that data
the only three things we really need to do are key out the background mask out any unwanted items in
the shot and then color match the two plates we do have a previous tutorial on green screening
inside of fit film which effect you use depends on whether using express or pro in this case
i'm going to use pro and use the chroma key effect then i'll mask out any unwanted items inside of my
scene again we do have a previous tutorial on this from axel you can find that in the description as
well i knew that i was going to export the final piece as a 2.4 aspect ratio so much
thinner vertically than it was shot this helped save some time because i didn't have to mask out
things that were outside of those boundaries for color matching and color grading i'm going to use
mostly just curves and the hue saturation and lightness effect to tweak the contrast
and brightness of each clip individually to help match them up finally i'll stylize it by
using the bleach bypass effect a little bit of chromatic aberration a vignette and some final
color grading tweaks to bring it all together and that is an overview of how to use unreal
engine 4 to create a fully 3d environment to use inside of your HitFilm creations if you like this
video please do let us know and if you have any questions about a specific section that we covered
if you want to see something in more detail do let us know in the comments because again this is the
first time that we've done a tutorial like this and we want to learn and improve and cover what
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